SELWESKI: Media frenzy over Christie bodes ill for 2016 coverage

Imagine it’s September 1997, Bill Clinton is just nine months into his second term, and speculation about who will succeed him in the White House is not a topic of discussion anywhere.

Down in Texas, the Republican governor’s staff, in a political prank gone haywire, has clandestinely clogged the lanes to the Sam Houston Tollway, one of the busiest highways in bustling Houston. The subsequent highway gridlock possibly represents retribution against the Houston mayor, a Democrat who is no fan of the governor.

That’s a local/state story that would never make it to the national level, correct?

Suppose it’s four months later, January 1998, and the governor, mentioned as a possible future presidential candidate, is on the hot seat in Texas because of hints that he may have known in advance about the lane closures on the Houston beltway?

Does it then become a national story? Suppose the governor is George W. Bush, son of former President George H.W. Bush – does it then spark a frenzy among the national press corps in Washington and New York?

No. It does not.

The embarrassing hyper-ventilating we’ve seen from the media over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s role, if any, in jamming up traffic on the George Washington Bridge certainly does not bode well for the type of coverage we will see in the 2016 presidential campaign.

This story, which began in September, three years before non-candidate Christie might be running for the Oval Office, somehow generated non-stop, around-the-clock coverage on cable news networks on Wednesday and Thursday and through much of Friday. This wildly overblown issue was also dominant on radio and generated big headlines in many newspapers.

This is all about what I call the soap operafication of American politics.

The media presents Christie as the tough guy, the “Sopranos-type” boss, who makes his enemies pay. The Republican governor’s appointees involved in this mess are portrayed as a shadowy Gang of Five, a supposedly fascinating cast of characters.

TV political analysts who should have their heads examined for talking in such a flippant manner insist that the entire episode demonstrates the secret culture in the governor’s office, or Christie’s inner insecurities, or the reasons for his bullying behavior, or his attempt to hide a lack of management skills. What kind of a character is he, really?

Even a common-sense political pundit such as Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia engaged in wildly reckless commentary on Wednesday prior to the governor’s instantly legendary press conference. Sabato essentially called Christie the new Nixon – a bully, a schemer, who engages in political paybacks; a paranoid leader who compiles enemies lists, doles out vendettas, then engages in cover-ups; and a power-hungry pol who plotted against his foes even as he was headed for a landslide victory in the next election.

Sure, the emails that surfaced quoting members of Christie’s team gleefully creating mayhem on the George Washington Bridge demonstrated an especially juvenile version of hardball politics. And, yes, the governor did invite intense scrutiny after previously acting sometimes in brutish and arrogant ways.

But his critics among the punditry were way over the top in their predictions about where this story was headed, even after he apologized for his staff’s behavior. They said voters would never forgive the governor’s office for making people endure a long commute from New York to New Jersey or for making schoolchildren late for class.

They wondered if a 91-year-old woman who lived near the bridge died because of a late response by an ambulance crew (the family later said it was not a factor).

Worse yet, these ravenous scribes said the tangled traffic could have led to deaths, and that criminal indictments could be coming down.

Wow – and here I thought this was a story about a traffic jam, not an effort by the governor to launch drone strikes on Fort Lee, N.J. The two likeliest targets of this foolish attempt at retribution are also not worth breathless reporting from TV correspondents -- the Democratic mayor of a small town or a state senator, neither of whom is household name, even in the Garden State.

As a moderate Republican, Christie is certainly suffering through an especially hellish experience because liberal Democrats have brought out their pitchforks and torches while conservative Republicans have smugly refused to offer any support, instead enjoying the show, watching the governor stew in his own juices.

Over at MSNBC, the furiously speculative coverage is obviously sparked by the prospect of knocking Christie off of his national perch. Some of the liberal talking-head guests clearly would love to help cast aside the Republican governor, whom they view as Hillary Clinton’s toughest potential challenger in ’16.

This story has been dissected to such a degree that one fixated journalist reported that, in his 2-hour press conference on Thursday, where most level-headed observers said Christie did a good job of forcefully proclaiming his innocence while accepting accountability, the governor said the word “I” 692 times. What kind of a person scours the transcript of a marathon press conference to count words?

As for the actual gridlock on the bridge, critics say it seemed to last forever, with lane closures for four days. At the risk of sounding crass, I have to ask why a person overseeing paramedics or school bus drivers wouldn’t establish alternate routes within hours of a standstill emerging on any highway. If they did not, they should join Christie’s axed deputy chief of staff in the unemployment line.

For every argument made that says the governor is lying and there’s much more to this story, I can make an equally convincing argument that Christie, a former federal prosecutor, would never risk his career to engage in such “abject stupidity,” as he called it. At worst, the governor chose to embrace a manner of plausible deniability.

At the same time, here’s a bit of perspective that would probably shock the New York-centric press corps – I would guess that at least half of Americans never knew before now that there is a George Washington Bridge (the “GW”) in New York City.

Nearly three years from now, when voters in Middle America head to the polls in November ’16, I can’t imagine that a traffic jam in New Jersey in 2013 will have any impact on how they cast their ballot.

In Michigan, where one of our leading products seems to be orange construction barrels, I suspect the reaction among many might be to – in their best Sopranos-style voice – say: “You call that a traffic jam? Let me show you a traffic jam …”